Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 8

Volume XXII Issue VIII Version I 12 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 © 2022 Global Journals A Locating Media in Cultural Theories of how the mind operates vis-à-vis the world based on the mediation of signs. 6 Signs in this system are secondary devices to organize general concepts, which are, according to Peirce, given in a cultural community. The task of a sign, whether an icon, index, or symbol, is to place a world object in a test to ensure that it can be aligned with a particular concept. Because of this attention to the mechanism at work, the theory avoids the problems emanating from the Saussurean dyadic semiology, wherein the validity of a concept (or a signified) is indubitable because of the rootedness of signs in empirical phenomena. In Peircean theory, signs rarely assume the concreteness of semiological signs. This difference is attributable to the difference in the fundamental status of the sign in the respective sign theories. While Saussure’s sign is arbitrary in relation to the meaning it signifies, and thereby demands an explication of its potency to signify, Peirce requires signs to satisfy a set of demands to achieve respective instrumentalities. As if anticipating the problems emanating from the handling of materiality in Saussurean semiology, Peircean theory presupposes an exercise of cognitive deliverance to fuse the contents of the referent with the actual reality. Located in the exercise of the mind, signs are released from the burden of semiological materiality. The tangible properties of signs are no longer necessary, being subjected to a transmutation, to an internalized topology of reflection. As mentioned above, this is a consequence of the idealist orientation of Peirce’s sign theory; free from the epistemological conundrum of how to demarcate signs in thought process and signs as empirical manifestations of the former, the theory prioritizes generality of the sign as a vehicle of cognitive processes. However, in media, materiality of signs regains hitherto suppressed autonomy and generates unexpected signifying powers apart from the 6 T.L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs , Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 18. Defining the difference between Pierce’s approach to sign and the approach of Saussure as that of “a semiotic philosophy of mind” versus “a theory of signs that takes mental functions largely for granted” (ibid., p. 16), Short writes, “Saussure made the sign a dead, a two-sided entity. Pierce, on the contrary, made the sign just one relatum of a triadic relation, of which the other two relata are the sign’s object and the sign’s interpretant. All three items are triadic in the sense that none is what it is – a sign, an object, or an interpretant – except by virtue of its relation to the other two. (ibid., p.18) semioticians’ purview. This explains the weariness of media study researchers to be overly reliant on the classical semiotic perspective. In dealing with media, semiotic theories position their components in the topology where the materiality of media is reduced to instrumentality. In media practices, those semiotic aspects of referentiality are retained, but inscribed in mediating substances; they are subjected to a secondary place of significance. Nevertheless, whether a certain media practice is mass printed for the public, transmitted through the air, or placed on digitalized global networks, the manner in which the original contents replicate affects the status of semantic components. Thus subjecting signs into spheres where the materiality of sign resumes its presence, media pose as the dual faces of semiotic reference and an additional semantic function deduced from the autonomy in the materiality of the medium. The problem is that these two semantic components are not only heterogenous in nature but also mutually exclusive, simply co-existing in an identical instance of media. Although Peircean theory allows multiple components to generate an instance of signification, the autonomy inherent in the materiality of media practices carries the face of subordinated elements put beyond the sphere of mental processes but often in wait to overtake the dominant sign. II. T exts and M edia The way in which media affect the status of representation promises an opening of an unexplored milieu by shedding light on the duality of media not fully covered by the conventional notion of referentiality. In media study, analysts have been well aware of the effects that occur when the substance of information is transferred in a medium other than the one originally used. Based on detailed research on readers’ reception of the newly printed classical texts at the ea rly phase of the print revolution, E.L. Eisenstein convincingly illuminated the way in which print media changed the attitudes of the contemporary to classical texts. 7 Febvre and Martin provide details on publication in Europe and substantiate the social consequences of print technology. 8 In writing about the correlation of print capitalism to the rise of nationalism, Anderson gives us a graphic picture of the formative power of media (in this case the novel and newspaper): I have been arguing that the very possibility of imaging the nation only arose historically when, and where, three fundamental critical conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on men’s mind …. No surprise then that 7 E.L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe , 1979, Cambridge. 8 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Joan Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 , 2010, Verso.